


The Lady and The Tiger

by Latia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Act 5 spoilers, Brief description of violence, F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-09
Updated: 2011-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:29:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/291152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Latia/pseuds/Latia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not like Nepeta is afraid of her or something. "Nepeta Leijon" and "fear" do not go together in the same sentence.</p><p>But "Aradia Megido" and "unsettling" do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lady and The Tiger

It’s not like Nepeta is _afraid_ of her or something. Living like she does ( _did_ ), having to kill beasts that dwarfed her just to eat, fear is a thing that gets put on a sort of mental shelf. You know you own it, you admire its pretty colors on occasion. Once or twice you think about actually taking it down, putting it to use, but mostly it just kind of sits there in the background, drawing dust.

‘Nepeta Leijion’ and ‘fear’ are two things that just don’t pop up in the same sentence.

But ‘Aradia Megido’ and ‘unsettling’ do. You see, Nepeta has learned to read life. As much fun as lively, challenging prey was to pursue, she often tried going after older animals. They’d go sooner or later, so why not sooner? She found out from a young age how to detect the signs of slipping away: shallow breathing. Foggy eyes. Movements slowed down by old and broken joints, like a robot after too many Zahhakian outbursts.

But she isn’t like Eq’s other robots. He crafted her, carved her form out of titanium and scraps, with only photographs and his ( _kind of creepy_ ) memories. The other robots were bulky, big things that could never be mistaken for a real troll. But the face he made her…a face that could emote, give smiles or frowns. The perfect spiral of her horns, prettily going against the curls of her hair. It was a real labor of ( _love?_ for some reason she can never quite push away the mental question mark) of love, and it showed. She was most certainly not like Eq’s other robots.

It might be easier if she were.

In the robot pile, Aradia sits only a few feet from Nepeta. She sits, and sits, and sits. The slight slope of her chest never varies. Her nostrils never flare, the hollow of her throat does not twitch. Her eyes blink, but not nearly enough—as if she only does it to spite others. Her  arms  are perfectly parallel at her sides,  and if she were to get up and walk out of the room, Nepeta knew she could keep time with her feet, steps as even and punctual as the swing of a clock.

But she _doesn’t_ get up. That’s the problem. That’s why Nepeta has to eventually stop faking her catnap, making a show of propping herself up on her hands and stretching. Hips up, back arch, why hello Miss Megido. “Oh…hello Aradia. Are you seeking that silly meowrail of mine, purr chance?”

Aradia’s head swivels about 33 degrees to Nepeta’s voice, the rest of her body staying unnaturally still. “Yes, I am waiting for Equius. I need to ask a favor of him.”

Nepeta purses her lips. This is around the time Equius always goes into the depths of the veil, generally lurking and making everyone nervous. She needs to remember to gently break it to him that he really shouldn’t space out and stand in places and watch. It always skeeves everyone out when he just…stands there.

And watches.

“Um, he’ll purrobably be back soon, but uh…what exactly did you need?”

A pause. Aradia’s flat red eyes glue themselves to Nepeta. She’s faintly aware of the whirr of machinery under Aradia’s skin. Finally, the iron lass bends her head forward, eyes almost parallel to the floor.

“My…hair.”

“Oh, I see!” Nepeta places a finger in the spot perfectly midway between Aradia’s horns. “It’s all tangled.” She pauses, and then retracts her hand, awkwardly scratching at her cheek. “Er, I think I could help unknot that. If you’re okay with—would you like me to help?”

Seconds slip. And…

“Yes please.”

To this day Nepeta has no idea how Equius managed to make hair as  lifelike as he did for Aradia. True, it’s cold and wiry and a bit too perfect, but it flows in curls and whorls like it used too. He must have spent hours, days inserting the fine wires into each individual pore…that boy. He might have been stuck up, or weird or brooding, but once he set his mind to something, it got done.

Still, Nepeta muses, fat lot of good it’s doing her now. The snarl in Aradia’s hair proves a tricky matter. And geez if the silence wasn’t awkward. And before she knows what she’s doing, Nepeta opens her mouth.

“So!...uh, how are things between you and Eq?”

Silence.

“Fine.”

“So you’re not…you know, hitting him anymore and stuff?”

Silence.

“On occasion.”

“O…oh.”

Silence.

“B-but you still make out, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“ Like, as long as you guy understand each other,  even if you guys haven’t settled on a quadUP I MEANT MAKE UP!” Nepeta claps a hand to her face, cheeks going olive. “S-sorry! I shouldn’t be—!”

“You don’t have to be sorry. A moirail should know everything about their other’s  concupiscent relations. I’d be upset if you didn’t ask.”

“Oh.”

“And we do.”

“Sor--pardon?”

“We do both. Up, and out.”

It takes Nepeta a moment to understand. “Oh.” Another moment, and she blushes harder. “ _Oh._ Um. Gr…great.”

Nepeta returns to the knot with new vigor, eager for a distraction. Silence spreads like wet blood in dry dirt.

“Aradia? Could I...could I ask you something, something a little, uh, purrsonal?”

“You don’t have to care about my privacy. It’s your right as a higher blood.”

“But I don’t--!” Oh gosh, that’s a whole other feelings jam she needs to tackle. “I...I just…” She bites her bottom lip. “I wanted to know, and you don’t have to tell me if it’s too purri—private. Um, how…how does it…”

Breath Nepeta, Breath.

“How does it…feel….to kiss?”

 

Silence

 

swells. 

 

The longer that time passes without an answer a lump grows in Nepeta’s throat. _Way to go, AC. Here’s to the Hero of Heart, failing spectacularly yet again in the topic of romance. Yeah, that would be right up there with how well your own pathetic pinings have gone-_

“It depends.”

Nepeta blinks.

“There are three people that I’ve kissed.” And in the most natural gesture Nepeta has seen her do since becoming a robot, Aradia tucks her legs gracefully under her skirt. “All have been different in some way.

“Equius.” She extends a single finger. “The first time I kissed him was out of anger, and out of power. He had tried, in whatever kind of logic works in his head, to make a gesture of love. But what he didn’t get was that in that gesture, he still put himself above me. Before he got into a relationship with me, he needed to understand that we had to be in the same level. I wanted to assert that even if he had helped I was not _his._ I kissed him to leave a message.”

Nepeta frowns. _But what about love?_   Still, she nods as if she understands. “And who else?”

There’s another pause, but for the first time there is an air of hesitation rather than apathy.

Finally: “Vriska.”

Nepeta’s hands clench involuntarily around Aradia’s horns. “ _What?!”_ Then, “Oops, ah, sorry. But…but how? What happened?”

“It was…” Aradia’s hands clench and unclench in her lap. “Before I died. It was a FLARP session, but we were away from our teammates. We were….” Nepeta looks over  Aradia’s head to see her eyes close. “Fighting, rolling around on the ground, but in the end, I managed to get on top of her. We were breathing hard, we had spent most of the night trying to get the upper hand on one another.

“She was waiting for me to land the final strike, but she was…” Aradia’s brows knot. “Grinning. Like she was saying ‘you can’t do it.’ In fact, I think she was trying to manipulate me, plant in my head the words ’I can’t.’I was trying to focus, but all I could think of was those words. Over and over, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I can’t beat her, I can’t help Tavros, I can’t overthrow her powers, I can't…”

Nepeta’s eyes threaten to engulf her face.

“…I can’t remember what I felt. I can guess at fury, at helplessness, maybe. But what I remember are two words, two words getting through that wall of ‘can’t.’ I thought, ‘stop her.’

“So. I did.”

There’s another silence. “She was livid. That, I remember. Unlike Equius, Vriska knew and understood my anger. She understood that we were similar in ability, and yet different in our morals and actions.”  Aradia turns to Nepeta the slightest bit. “That was a true black kiss, because it acknowledged the respect…and the hate.

“But unlike Equius, the problem was not that Vriska did not understand. She refused to acknowledge her understanding. She was involved with Eridan still, at the time, so she yelled something about that I couldn’t mess with her plans. I think her words were ‘there was no room’ for me. So she pushed me away, …and I believe,” and is that a smirk? “I recall her running.

“But, at the very least, I won the game.”

The girl falls silent again. Nepeta, as if waking up, remembers that she has a knot to attend to. She is able to keep her attention on it for about four minutes, but... “Oh, um, Aradia, didn’t you say—?”

“The third,” Aradia sighs, “was Sollux.

“We didn’t get to visit each other often, so I was excited to show him the ruins near my hive. We were in one cave, where I had found some strange structures I had told him about earlier. I…” Nepeta hears the slight _whirrrr_ of her eyelids lowering. “I...had turned my back to him for a moment, and was telling him about the ruins. I guess I was excited. And I turned back, and…”

“….and he kissed you?” Nepeta whispers in an awed voice. She sees it as easy as a remembered story. _Aradia talking a mile a minute, her sculpted cheekbone marked with a smudge of errant mud. Sollux with a rare smile, watching the girl in the middle of everything she loved, everything he loved about her, and in a moment of daring emotion, he leaned in…_

“Yes.” Aradia’s voice brings Nepeta back to reality. “It’s…difficult to remember things from back then. But I recall…a drop. Like walking down a set of stairs and missing one. It felt like that, but in my stomach.”

“I guess no one had warned you about stairs?” Nepeta laughs a little too loud at her own joke. “Um, sorry. But what happened then?”

 _“_ …But he drew back quickly, before I could really register it. I suppose I was confused. But he just said to forget it. ‘Forget it, forget it forget it,’ until I changed the subject. He refused to acknowledge it.”

“But that…was that your furrst? First?”

“Yes.”

“And his first too?”

“I don’t know, but I can assume so.”

“And you never talked about it again?!” Nepeta grows a bit indigent.

“He didn’t want to.”

“But!....” Nepeta gets up without thinking, suddenly needing to move a bit. “It just…it just doesn’t seem right!”

She turns to Aradia’s unmoving (unless that microscopic twitch was surprise) face. “People don’t just… do stuff without feeling something! He wanted to tell you something, or make you understand, or, or…oh, it must have been just awful for him! To feel something like that, to be SO close to saying something, and then backing down at the last second, and never saying ANYTHING, and then having to know he never did when it was too lat--!”

Nepeta freezes.

 

“I…I…” Nepeta rubs at her face, at tears that aren’t there. “I’m sorry Aradia, that was really…dumb of me, I shouldn’t be putting my nose where it doesn’t belong…nevermind, I shouldn’t have brought it up. U-um, your…” She suddenly feels very tired. “I think I got your hair fixed.”

Aradia stands. “Thank you.”

Without a word, she starts towards the door with even, untroubled footsteps (punctual as a clock)—

“W, wait, Aradia?”

She stops without a hint of slowing. Dead still. She turns only her head. Nepeta watches her own red tinted reflection stare back at her from her eyes.

“I…this isn’t like, an order or anything—you shouldn’t let anyone order you, me or Eq, but…uh…it’s really—I _think_ it’s really hard when you feel something for someone but you’re too scared to say it.

“It’s really…” She fidgets, grabbing her tail and wringing it between her fists. “I guess it seems kind of cowardly, but it really…burns you up inside, because you want to say something, _anything,_ but the words won’t come, they sort of, choke, in your throat. That’s the best way to describe it—I, I _think_ ….but…”

Nepeta sighs. “What I’m trying to say is, I know you and Equius are together now, but now that you’re in the same place and everything , maybe you should at least…talk to Sollux. Give him one last chance to tell you anything. To let him have…closure.”

There’s a long silence, in which Nepeta does not even dare to look up. Finally:

“I see.”

And:

“Thank you, Nepeta.”

By the time she looks Aradia is gone.

(...)

 _The city is burning. The static smell of the strange neon green fire is everywhere, Nepeta can practically taste it—or maybe it’s just her blood, bright green between her teeth. It hurts, it hurts so much…_

 _But above all the never ending green, she sees a dot of red. A smiling, serene figure of maroon among all the chaos, she looks down, radiant, so perfect, it almost hurts to look at her. Nepeta manages, just barely, to prop herself on her elbows as she comes close._

 _“             ,” she says._

 _“What…?” Nepeta forces the word from the cracked mess where her throat used to be._

 _“I’m sorry, I can’t help.” Her smile gains a tinge of sadness. “But you were right Nepeta, thank you. Tell...tell Equius thank you, too._

 _“I’ll see you soon. But remember, Nepeta,              . If I can get it, so can you. Tell him. Get             ….”_

 _“I, I can’t hear….” Nepeta’s vision goes black around the edges. She looks down at her with such kindness and pity. She seems almost like a goddess…_

Nepeta awakens from burning to burning. Sollux is crying.

(...)

(Images flicker across her mind like dying moths. Aradia, mournful and mechanical. Aradia, electric in a way she had never known she could be….)

“Closure,” Nepeta murmurs to the floor. “That’s what she said.”

(Equius, crushing robots like soda cans. Equius, holding her hand as it were glass. A scowling boy. A tired boy. A crude drawing, two figures kissing happily, one in black and grey, one in green and blue…)

 _Closure_. Nepeta cracks a weak smile as the club comes down. _That might have been nice._


End file.
